The Wave

When published in 1929, Evelyn Scott’s The Wave was lauded as “magnificent,” “monumental,” and “masterly” in its experimental, almost cinematic, narrative technique and its modernist view of war and history. For those same reasons, less visionary reviewers labeled it “a failure.” Without sentimentality, nostalgia, or a hint of southern apology, Scott takes as her subject the Civil War and shapes it into a kaleidoscopic design. She tells the story not of a single family or person, but of countless characters – northern, southern, black, white, male, and female – from nearly every conceivable background in many different predicaments. Like drops of water in a wave, they are all caught up in the overwhelming force of war, of history. The Wave set a standard against which all subsequent war novels have been compared. It was partly responsible for inspiring a trend in sprawling books on the Civil War that culminated in Margaret Mitchell’s romanticized version in 1936, but it remains unique as a literary mosaic of the human condition, a novel of international consequence and boldly innovative method.